Chapter 4 - The Poison Beneath the River
I slipped the silver thumb drive out from the cracked cedar panel and closed my fingers around it before Evan could look up from loading Megan's muddy suitcases into the trunk of his Mercedes at the curb.
While the locksmith reinstalled my original deadbolts under the watchful eye of Vance's security team—who had been hired on the spot to guard my perimeter twenty-four hours a day—Adrian followed me into the warm, high-ceilinged library at the back of the house.
Here, let me see your hand, Adrian said quietly, noticing a thin streak of blood across my palm where a splinter from my father's broken drafting table had cut my skin.
The billionaire who commanded eleven billion dollars in global assets knelt beside the leather sofa without a second thought, opened the first-aid kit from the butler's pantry, and cleaned the cut with antiseptic gauze as gently as if my hand were priceless porcelain.
For ten years, if I got a fever or cut my finger in the kitchen, Evan had asked me when dinner would still be ready.
Why are you being so kind to me tonight, Adrian?
I asked softly, looking down at the silver threads at his temples as he pressed a clean bandage over my palm.
Because eight years ago in Charleston, when a steel scaffolding rig gave way on a harbor site during a hurricane squall, your father Arthur pushed me out from under a falling two-ton girder and broke three of his own ribs doing it, Adrian said, looking up into my eyes with quiet intensity.
When I visited him in the hospital two months before he died, he made me promise that if Evan Whitmore ever showed his true colors, I would not let his daughter stand alone against that family.
A lump rose in my throat at the memory of my father, and I opened my laptop on the library coffee table, plugging the silver thumb drive from the broken drafting table into the side port.
Look at this file, Adrian, I whispered as four password-protected folders opened automatically—because Evan, in his arrogant laziness, had used his own golf handicap and birthday as the encryption key.
As Adrian leaned over my shoulder, his warm scent of cedar and rain steadying my nerves, we opened the first PDF marked CONFIDENTIAL ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION - PARCEL SEVEN.
My breath caught in my chest as I read the laboratory results inside.
Parcel Seven was the twelve-acre riverfront tract at the center of the River District development—land that Evan had purchased through a Whitmore subsidiary two years ago from an old textile dyeing plant and was scheduled to transfer into the four-hundred-million-dollar joint venture next week.
According to this private core-sample test conducted six months ago, the groundwater forty feet beneath Parcel Seven is saturated with hexavalent chromium and trichloroethylene at forty times the federal Environmental Protection Agency toxic limit!
I stared at the screen in horror.
If anyone Excavates that soil for high-rise foundations without a thirty-million-dollar hazardous waste abatement, the toxins will leach straight into the Catawba River water supply—and Evan buried the real lab report!
Adrian reached past me and clicked open the second file on the drive, which contained the official State of North Carolina Environmental Clearance Certificate that had been submitted to Cole Capital and the city zoning board last month.
Look at the bottom of page six, Claire, Adrian said, his voice dropping to a lethal murmur.
The state soil engineer's signature had been digitally altered using high-resolution graphic software from Megan Brooks's communications department—and directly beneath it, certifying under penalty of twenty years in federal prison that she had personally inspected the uncontaminated soil samples, was a forged replica of my own signature as Chief Operating Officer!
Evan and Megan did not just steal my four point five million dollars tonight, I realized aloud, a cold shiver running down my spine.
They forged my signature on a federal environmental felony so that the moment the bulldozers hit toxic sludge next month, I would go to federal prison as the fall guy while they walked away with the development fees and my shares!
Suddenly, a heavy pounding echoed against the front oak door of the house, followed by the ringing of the brass doorbell.
When Adrian and I walked into the front foyer, we saw through the leaded sidelight glass that the police cruiser and the movers had gone—but Evan's black Mercedes had circled back down the block and parked at the bottom of the front steps with its headlights and dashboard camera pointed squarely at my front porch.
Standing under the portico were Evan and Megan.
Open the door, Claire, I left my titanium briefcase in the downstairs study and the officer said I could retrieve my work computer!
Evan shouted through the glass.
At Adrian's nod, Vance stood just out of sight in the hallway while I unlocked the front door and stepped only halfway onto the threshold, with Adrian standing directly behind me in his white dress shirt with his sleeves rolled to the elbows.
The sight of Adrian Cole standing inside my foyer at midnight without his tuxedo jacket sent a flash of livid, irrational rage across Evan's face.
Wait outside on the steps while Vance gets your briefcase, Evan, I said coldly.
Before Evan could reply, Megan stepped past him onto the top wet stone step of the porch, glanced back once to make sure the glowing red recording light of the dashboard camera inside Evan's idling Mercedes had a clear line of sight to the doorway, and suddenly grabbed my wrist with her left hand!
Look me in the eye, Claire, Megan hissed in a voice so low and venomous that Evan, standing six feet back by the pillar in the rain, could not hear her over the thunder.
You think you won tonight because Adrian Cole sat with you, you pathetic idiot?
May you like
There is no baby—I bought the eleven-week ultrasound off a clinic technician for five hundred bucks to make your gullible husband empty your bank accounts before we ruin you both!
Before I could even pull my wrist out of her grip, Megan let go, screamed at the top of her lungs—Claire, no, please do not push me, the baby!—and threw herself backward down the five stone steps onto the wet brick landing!
